Mariam AbuItewi, who dreamed up the idea of a ride-sharing app while waiting for a lift in the Gaza strip. Photograph: Patrick Kingsley for the Guardian
Gaza and Uber aren’t the likeliest of combinations. The latter is a ride-sharing app, valued this week at $40bn (£25.6bn), that relies on its users owning smartphones. The former is a recovering war zone with no 3G network. Safe to say, Uber won’t be expanding in to Gaza any time soon.
Which is just as well, because it would face spirited local competition. This summer, a young Gazan entrepreneur released her own ride-sharing application called Wasselni, which allows Gazans to find nearby taxi drivers and car-driving Facebook friends when connected to a Wi-Fi network. It will also soon work offline: type a cafe’s name into Wasselni, and you will get a list of numbers for drivers and cab firms working in the neighbourhood.
It is Gaza’s lo-fi, cash-only answer to Uber – but with crucial differences. Notoriously, Uber lets you hitch a ride with any random driver; Wasselni doesn’t. You can ride-share with one of your Facebook friends, but the only strangers on the system are vetted cabbies. More symbolically, while Uber was conceived by a brash American bored of waiting for taxis in the San Francisco rain, Wasselni was dreamed up by Mariam Abultewi, then a 22-year-old refugee waiting for a lift in the middle of the Gaza strip.
“I live in al-Nuseirat refugee camp,” says Abultewi, now 25, and one of Gaza’s first female CEOs. “Drivers spend a lot of time there trying to find the right passenger, and the passengers spend a long time in the street waiting for the right taxi.”
The idea of Wasselni soon followed, and, three years on, the startup has around 2,000 subscribers and about 70 vetted drivers, who all pay a proportion of their Wasselni-linked earnings back to the company. There might have been more by now, but this summer’s war meant Wasselni lost a lot of the momentum it built up in the spring.
It is just one example of how hard it can be to do business in Gaza. The Israeli and Egyptian blockade means few goods can cross the border, and very few people can either. Electricity is available for only a few hours a day, and during the war, it was completely cut. The pool of customers, employees and mentors inside the enclave is shallow, and doing business outside it often seems beyond the realms of possibility.